Extremely slow Internet.
Hi, I am having a problem with extremely slow Internet, your website says that emails will be replied to within 24 hours but I have not received a single reply to any email that I have sent the company, and no they are not in my spam folder.
A litte background on myself... I am a professional electronics technician I do componet level circuit board repairs including SMD/SMT, for a little while I was a Tier-3 technician for what is now Century Link, and I worked at three different "Help Desks" for major companies for a total of around 17 years, I also build PCs, fix laptops, and whatever else happens to come my way.
So... my PC which runs a version of Linux worked just fine in Portland on an 85 meg DSL line, as did my Android phone and my laptop which also runs Linux, over a year and a half I had zero problems there, and then I moved out in the middle of nowhere and you were my only option, when this was first hooked up your service was slow but it worked and I barely used it while I was getting moved in...
But now I am moved in and trying to do what worked fine in Portland on the DSL line and everything is extremely slow, Netflix just sits there and spins it's red swirly thing sometimes for several minutes then the video finally loads then a minute or so later it buffers again and sometimes up to ten minutes later it will finally load the video again, other times it gives me an error to check my Internet connection.
YouTube doesn't take as long to load videos but about every 5-10 seconds buffers and is completely unwatchable, it is so unwatchable that I resorted to playing from my MP3 collection, it has also told me to check my Internet connection.
Amazon Prime Video I have only tried to use once, after sitting there for a while it gave an error and asked if I wanted to wait longer for the video to load, I said yes and then after waiting a while it gave another error that my Internet connection was too slow to provide stable video streaming and then just like YouTube if buffered over and over, it is not watchable.
Once in a while my PC will actually give an error that my Internet connection has been lost, my PC is plugged directly into your modem with an industry grade Cat6 cable and is not going through any other devices, I have tried the onboard Ethernet jack and the PCI Ethernet card and they both do the same thing, I also tried the other ports on the modem.
Normal websites take several minutes to load and usually just stall and I have to hit Reload, even the hughesnet.com website just slooooowwwwwllllllllyyyyy loads the pictures and about 2-3 minutes later the "My Account" button will finally show up.
My laptop and Android phone are both going over WiFi and are connecting at 72 megs and are both experiencing the same problems that the PC is, everything has been rebooted and I have run the required speed tests which oddly look fine (see below), but weirdly enough the best that this has ever worked was during a blizard when the dish was covered in a thick sheet of ice things were loading as well as they ever did on the DSL line in Portland and then once it warmed up and the ice melted off the dish things went back to being slow again, my theory on that is that my dish is not aligned just right and the thich sheet of ice was accounting for that and realigning the radio beam correctly.
While trying to watch a 3.5 minute music video on my phone (via the YouTube app) the download status bar was barely keeping up with the video % bar, the download bar stalled several times and then eventually the video caught up with it and the buffering started.
Also... Netflix and YouTube have their video quality turned down as low as they will go and they are still buffering.
Anyway here are the speed tests, please do whatever you can to fix this.
:::.. Upload Speed Test Result Details ..:::
Upload Connection Speed:: 1954 kbps or 2 Mbps
Upload Speed Test Size:: 1.2 MB or 1224 kB or 1253376 bytes
Upload Binary File Transfer Speed:: 244 kB/s
Tested At:: https://TestMy.net
Validation:: https://testmy.net/db/cPJ_6pFMk
Client Stats:: https://testmy.net/quickstats/lrobinson0615 https://testmy.net/compID/14725687484652
Test Time:: 2021-03-04 18:49:07 Local Time
Client Location:: Yakima, WA US https://testmy.net/city/yakima_wa
Target:: Dallas, TX https://dallas.testmy.net
Client Host:: Hughes Network Systems https://testmy.net/hoststats/hughes_network_syste
Compare:: 7% > client avg, 46% > host avg, 62% < city avg, 90% < country avg, 88% < world index
1MB Upload in 4.2 Seconds - 1GB Upload in ~1 Hour
This test of exactly 1.2 MB took 5.132 seconds to complete
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.182 Safari/537.36 [!]
:::.. Download Speed Test Result Details ..:::
Download Connection Speed:: 39552 kbps or 39.6 Mbps
Download Speed Test Size:: 45.5 MB or 46609 kB or 47727513.6 bytes
Download Binary File Transfer Speed:: 4944 kB/s or 4.9 MB/s
Tested At:: https://TestMy.net
Validation:: https://testmy.net/db/DXNBK3s_b
TiP Measurement Summary:: Min 34.28 Mbps | Middle Avg 40.9 Mbps | Max 45.01 Mbps | 23% Variance
Client Stats:: https://testmy.net/quickstats/lrobinson0615 https://testmy.net/compID/14725687484652
Test Time:: 2021-03-04 19:47:42 Local Time
Client Location:: Yakima, WA US https://testmy.net/city/yakima_wa
Target:: Dallas, TX https://dallas.testmy.net
Client Host:: Hughes Network Systems https://testmy.net/hoststats/hughes_network_syste
Compare:: 9% > client avg, 90% > host avg, 19% > city avg, 42% < country avg, 27% > world index
1MB Download in 0.21 Seconds - 1GB Download in ~4 Minutes
This test of exactly 45.52 MB took 9.661 seconds to complete
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.182 Safari/537.36 [!]
Hi again,
It has been six months and I have just learned to put up with this and upgraded my service to account for constantly having to reload pages that freeze and videos that get stuck, recently my phone line has had a hum on it and people say that they are having a hard time hearing me, the grounding rod that the telephone demarcation box is attached to is very old and in a very bad place so its always been my plan to replace it...
I also have a new computer and a newer operating system but I'm still having the same problems.
When my satellite dish was installed the installer hooked up the ground wire for the incoming signal cable to an old propane line that just disappears into the foundation, this house was built in 1940 and I have no idea how old that propane line is but due to corrosion issues and the fact that it could have a plastic coupler or some kind of rubber seal in it somewhere (which would not make it a good grounding point) I've always suspected it as being a possible problem to the Internet being slow here.
So... to get to the point... to solve both problems I drove an eight foot long galvanized 5/8" thick grounding rod into the ground behind the satellite dish and ran a new ground wire for the signal cable and hooked it up to the new grounding rod, the service is working amazingly well now videos are streaming like they should and I only have to reload things every once in a while, I'm going to see how things go but I may downgrade my service back down if I end up not needing the bandwidth.
It is hard to quantify how much money and time this has cost me all over an installation error, if I really wanted to pursue this it would probably end up costing HughesNet a lot of money, but that is more time and effort than I'm willing to put into a billing issue so I'm just going to let this go as a learning experience.
My advice to everyone that is having slow Internet problems though is that if you can't get any kind of resolution within a month or two get a technician to come out and take a look at things if you don't know how to fix them yourself, don't put up with it as long as I did.
